The first episode that Apple TV sent to the press of its new series, Pluribusincluded an earlier message from its creator, Vince Gilligan, asking journalists not to reveal too much of the plot. “We have been very careful not to know the details and we ask that it stay that way,” he said. The new creation of the manager breaking Bad AND Better call Saulo (released November 7th and with new episodes every Friday) It’s quite a mystery. Before its premiere it was only known that it would be a science fiction story in which “the most miserable person in the world tries to save humanity from happiness”. And little else.
So the first question for Gilligan is just what can be said about the series. “I know it’s hard and I’m sorry to make your job even harder,” he apologizes on video call. “I usually say it’s about a romance writer who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and in the first episode something really big happens that changes the whole world and she’s desperately trying to save the world from this thing, even though we’re not sure the world needs saving.” Cryptic enough that I still don’t have a clear idea of the plot.
Both the viewer and the character played by Rhea Seehorn will simultaneously discover what is happening. “That’s the intention. I like shows like this. What I do best is telling stories about a character,” Gilligan continues. “Other writers are very good at collective stories, with lots of characters where you switch between them. I’m better at one character’s stories, seeing the world through their eyes. Some of my best experiences watching films and series have been with stories I knew nothing about before. An example is The X-Files. The first night it aired in 1993, 32 years ago, I was home alone, it was a Friday, I was bored and wandering around the TV and, boom, it came on. The X-Files. I was hooked in five minutes. I hadn’t read anything about her and was very happy to discover her. “I want the same thing for our audience.”
The mention of The X-Files It’s not a coincidence. Before Vince Gilligan achieved universal fame as the creator of one of the most popular series in history, breaking Badhe had cut his teeth on television as a screenwriter of the Mulder and Scully stories. Much of that creepy fun was behind it The X-Files it is also present in Pluribusa peculiar turn for a writer and producer who has spent almost 15 years in the dark and criminal universe of breaking Bad AND Better call Saulo.
The idea for Pluribus (Latin word meaning many or plurality and is included in one of the first national mottos of the United States: “E pluribus unum,” from many, one) Gilligan had gotten it about 8 or 10 years ago while working on the screenplay for Better call Saulo. As he cleared his head by taking a walk around the neighborhood where they were writing the series and letting his thoughts wander from place to place, he suddenly imagined a man to whom everyone was incredibly kind. But a story in which people are very happy is of little interest, so he asked himself: why was everyone so nice to him? “We were doing Better call Saulowhere all the actors were amazing, but there was one person in particular that caught my attention, and that was Rhea Seehorn. It was really nice. When we hired her I have to admit I didn’t know who she was, I met her through her work on our series, and I saw how funny she was and then I discovered that she had done a lot of comedy, and at the same time she could be very dramatic. So I said to myself, why does this series have to be with a man and not a woman? “I ended up writing the story specifically for Rhea.”
It’s paradoxical that, just when the real world is more polarized than ever, Vince Gilligan bets on a premise that puts kindness and extreme, even disturbing, kindness at its center. Can’t kindness be understood as something subversive these days? The writer laughs at the question: “I like how you put it. Kindness may seem subversive, but I don’t think it is, I think most people are good. There are a lot of bad things in the world and there are bad people, you know, running things. There are bad people in the news every day who make our lives miserable. America is a country that seems split down the middle. I don’t think anyone on one side or the other would want to live in a situation like that chaotic, angry, unhappy world. I like to think about what it would be like to live in a world where all people got along. Pluribus It’s not always good for everyone to have the same mentality. It’s nice to have our own individuality. “There should be a middle ground.”
It is also shocking that, after having written antihero stories for so long and in which the line between good and evil is so blurred, I have chosen to tell the story of a kind and happy humanity and of a woman who, even in her own way, wants to save the world. Is the era of antiheroes on television over? “I wouldn’t say that, I think every storyteller should tell their own stories. Personally, it was like enjoying a delicious meal, but there comes a time when I can’t eat another bite. I feel like I’ve written enough antiheroes for a while. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be that way forever. When I created breaking Badit was kind of a reaction to the fact that I had been writing heroes for almost 10 years. I wrote The X-Files and it was a great job, Mulder and Scully were heroic characters. But I thought, ‘Maybe it would be nice to write about a bad guy.’ And now I miss good guys, especially in the world we live in. “There are a lot of good people, we just need to let them speak and be more responsible about things.”
While Pluribus AND breaking Bad They are different stories that have nothing to do with each other, they share some aspects. The most obvious is the actress Rhea Seehorn, but also the Albuquerque environment. Does Vince Gilligan have trouble separating himself from the world of Walter White and Saul Goodman? “I know that breaking Bad It’s the first thing I’ll put in my obituary when I die, hopefully very soon. It doesn’t matter what you do. I love breaking Bad and I’m proud and grateful for that, but I wanted to do something new. I love Rhea Seehorn and I love my team in Albuquerque, so much that I moved the show there so I could work with them again. There is no other reason why Pluribus happens in Albuquerque. In fact, it has even complicated everything a little more because now I have to continually explain that there are no intentional connections with breaking Bad”laughs.
While watching the series (the press had access to seven episodes of the nine that make up the season) many questions arise: why is Carol, the protagonist, different from the rest of humanity? Is there a solution to what happened? And another big question: will all questions be answered? Gilligan laughs again. “I don’t know if I’ll have answers for everything. I don’t really care why Carol is different, she just is. I don’t know if all the questions will be answered, but I know that all the questions that need an answer will be answered. I want the audience to be satisfied, like I wanted them to be satisfied at the end of breaking Bad OR Better call Saulo. But sometimes it’s satisfying to leave viewers wanting to know more and have them answer some questions themselves instead of telling them ‘this is the answer’,” he concludes.
